Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  Munich Deputy Police President Friedrich Tenner was of a different opinion. After his release, Tenner protested, Hitler—who was “more than ever the soul of the movement”—would “resume his ruthless battle with the government and not shy away from breaking the law.”114 The head prosecutor of Munich’s First District Court, Ludwig Stenglein, also came out against granting Hitler early release. Considering their behaviour during the trial and their incarceration, Stenglein objected, there was no sign that the convicts had given up their “state-threatening” views or would abide by the law in future. On 29 September, after Munich’s Third Criminal Division had nonetheless granted Hitler’s appeal for early release, state prosecutors filed an appeal to the Bavarian Supreme Court.115 That ruled out Hitler being set free on 1 October, which turned the mood bleak among his supporters in Landsberg.116

  Hitler, however, did not seem particularly concerned. What bothered him more were considerations within the Bavarian government about whether he should be deported to Austria. In October 1924, the government sent a representative to Vienna to negotiate “Austria potentially taking over Hitler.” But the border control in Passau had already received instructions to deny Hitler entry to the country. The Austrian government stuck to its view that by “emigrating” to Bavaria and serving in the Bavarian army Hitler had forfeited his Austrian citizenship.117 On 16 October, after being erroneously informed that he had been stripped of his Austrian citizenship, Hitler declared that he did not perceive this as a loss because he had never “felt like an Austrian citizen but rather always like a German.”118 In early April 1925 he officially applied to be released from Austrian citizenship. The government in Vienna granted his request by the end of the month.119 Hitler was henceforth stateless: he would not become a German citizen until 1932.

  The Bavarian Supreme Court rejected the Munich prosecutors’ appeal on 6 October 1924. The latter made one final attempt to get permission for Hitler’s early release revoked, but when Leybold once again put in a good word for his model prisoner, the court ruled that Hitler should be let go on 20 December.120 The results of national elections on 7 December may have influenced that decision. The National Socialist Liberation Movement only polled 3 per cent of the vote, less than half of what it had got in May.121 Ethnic right-wing radicalism seemed to have passed its zenith, and many people no longer saw it posing much of a threat. In this context, a well-to-do Munich woman petitioned Bavarian President Heinrich Held “to make peace with that most German of Germans, Adolf Hitler.” With the vote having gone against his party, the woman argued, there was no need to keep him behind “dungeon walls.” She added: “If the German people had twenty Hitlers, we’d be in a lot better shape today.”122

  When he left Landsberg, Hitler asserted in February 1942, everyone from the director to the guards wept. “We won them all over,” he bragged.123 Gregor Strasser and Anton Drexler had come with a car, intending to chauffeur Hitler immediately to a meeting with Ludendorff. “The competition for him has started even earlier than I expected,” wrote Hess. “[Hitler] had no intention of going with them. He was outraged, saying that for the meantime he wanted to rest and nothing else.”124 Hitler’s relationship with Ludendorff had cooled noticeably during his incarceration. The party leader had not forgotten how the general had let Kahr, Lossow and Seisser “escape” on 8 November.125 He also resented Ludendorff not only for getting himself elected to the Reichstag but for taking the lead in efforts to merge the DVFP and the NSDAP. “Ludendorff had another think coming,” when Hitler was released, Hess wrote on 11 December. “He doesn’t know the Tribune at all!”126

  Instead of going to meet Ludendorff, Hitler had himself picked up by Adolf Müller, the owner of the printing press used by Eher Verlag, and his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. Hoffmann took a shot of Hitler posing before the Landsberg city gate, which ran in numerous newspapers with the caption “Hitler leaves Landsberg.”127 Arriving back in Munich, he found his apartment in Thierschstrasse full of flowers and laurel wreaths. “My dog almost knocked me back down the stairs from sheer joy,” Hitler recalled.128 Three days later, Hitler paid his respects at the Bruckmanns’ salon on Karolinenplatz. “How nice it is here,” he was said to have remarked on seeing the splendour of the place, before writing in the Bruckmanns’ guestbook: “Whoever is broken by sorrow deserves no joy.”129 He spent Christmas with the Hanfstaengls, who had swapped their apartment in Gentzstrasse for a villa in Pienzenauerstrasse near the Herzogpark. “Please, Hanfstaengl, play me the Liebestod,” Hitler requested when he arrived at the house. The sound of Wagner’s music, Hanfstaengl recalled, dissolved Hitler’s tension: “He seemed relaxed, almost giddy, as he greeted my wife…He apologised again for what had happened in Uffing, hummed a funny melody for our daughter Hertha and couldn’t stop praising our new home.”130

  A newsletter circulating among the local groups of the VB at the end of December 1924 greeted Hitler with the words: “The man of strong action and unwavering political goals has come back to us.”131 But during the first few weeks after Christmas, Hitler refrained from involving himself in politics. He visited the inmates who remained behind in Landsberg and devoted himself to readying Mein Kampf for publication. “He had to run around a lot because of those left behind in Landsberg and because of his book,” a former fellow inmate from Munich recalled.132 Hitler was carefully checking out the terrain to avoid any missteps when he returned to the arena of politics. “Hitler is maintaining his icy silence,” the Bayerischer Anzeiger newspaper reported on 21 January 1925, “as well as the aloofness his supporters find so unnerving.”133

  8

  Führer on Standby

  “I’m no longer unknown, and that’s the most important springboard for us as we give it another try,” Hitler told Ernst Hanfstaengl after his release from Landsberg. He also reassured Hanfstaengl’s wife Helene: “I promise you one thing…The next time I’m not just going to topple off my perch.”1 Hitler had already decided in prison to reconstitute the NSDAP, and since he refused to take sides among the warring factions, his aura had remained undamaged. Thus he was in an excellent position to unite most of the rival individuals and groups behind him. It was his intention from the very start to transform the NSDAP into an unquestioning instrument for his own will. To further this aim, his power base in Munich had to remain the seat of the party. Hitler attached sacral importance to the birthplace of Nazism: “Rome, Mecca, Moscow—every one of these places embodies a world view!” he proclaimed. “We shall remain in the city that saw the first party comrades shed their blood for our movement. It must become the Moscow of our movement!”2 He added: “The holiest site is the one in which there has been the most suffering.”3

  But conditions in Munich had changed since the rise of the NSDAP in the early 1920s. After the post-war political crises and hyperinflation, the Weimar Republic consolidated itself between 1924 and 1928. Once the reichsmark had been stabilised, the German economy recovered surprisingly quickly. In 1927, industrial production again reached pre-war levels. Real wages also grew at a healthy rate, while unemployment, which had stood at 20 per cent in the winter of 1923–4, was receding. The worst was seemingly over, and a cautious optimism was spreading through society.

  Germany could also celebrate some progress in foreign policy. With the adoption in 1924 of the Dawes Plan, which tied reparations payments to the state of the economy, Germany received assurances that the military occupation of the Ruhr region would end within a year. Under Gustav Stresemann, who served as Germany’s foreign minister through a succession of governments from 1924 to 1929, relations continually improved with the Entente countries, in particular with France. In the 1925 Treaty of Locarno, Germany recognised its western border laid out in the Treaty of Versailles and guaranteed that the Rhineland would be kept demilitarised. In return, France and Belgium waived demands for further territorial concessions. In 1926, after these agreements had come into force, Germany was ceremoniously inducted into the League of Nations. The even
t marked the country’s return to the international community.4

  When Germans today talk about the “Golden Twenties,” however, they don’t primarily mean economic recovery and political successes, but rather “Weimar culture,” an unusually rich flourishing of creativity and experimentalism.5 Around 1923–4, the ecstatic pathos and social utopianism of expressionism gave way to New Objectivity, a cooler and socially more realistic outlook that set the tone in painting, literature and architecture. The most concrete expression of this attitude was Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus movement in Weimar and later Dessau. Bauhaus was an experimental laboratory for new functional architecture, furniture and home appliances. New media such as vinyl records, radio and sound film facilitated the rise of modern mass culture, whose offerings could be enjoyed by people beyond the privileged upper classes. Sports like football, athletics, boxing and bicycle- and car-racing became increasingly popular. In his autobiography the journalist Sebastian Haffner identified a veritable “sports mania” that took hold of him and many other young people in the mid-1920s.6 The capital of the Golden Twenties was undeniably Berlin, full of cinemas and dance halls where American imports like the Shimmy and the Charleston were all the rage. Women’s fashion was more practical and casual, and the page-boy haircut became a symbol of female emancipation. Attitudes towards sex were unprecedentedly liberal. All these experiences, impulses and distractions worked against the previous trend towards political radicalism—but only as long as Germany’s fragile economic recovery continued.

  The times were no longer favourable for Hitler. “Today, inflation no longer nourishes the desperation politics of a putsch,” the Bayerischer Anzeiger newspaper reasoned. “The conditions have changed, and Hitler will have to adjust his policies.”7 Nonetheless, as Hitler’s newly appointed personal secretary Hess noted, the “Tribune” was “in good spirits” and “full of his old energy” as he set about reconstituting the Nazi Party. “The superfluous fat gained at L[andsberg] is gone,” Hess wrote. “Once again he hardly has any free time. The hunt is back on!”8 Hitler had carefully prepared his return to the political stage. The first step was to get the Bavarian government to lift the ban on the NSDAP. In early January 1925, therefore, Hitler paid a visit to the Bavarian state president and chairman of the BVP, Heinrich Held. He expressed regrets for the attempted putsch, requested that his co-conspirators still detained in Landsberg be released, and promised to stay within the bounds of the law in future. At the same time, he distanced himself from attacks made by Ludendorff and other representatives of the far right upon the Catholic Church. Held’s reaction was cool. The Bavarian government, he said, would under no circumstances tolerate conditions like those in the run-up to 9 November 1923 and would use “every means of state authority” to prevent a repeat of the past. But he did ultimately agree to lift the ban on the NSDAP and the Völkischer Beobachter. “The beast is tamed,” Held is said to have remarked. “Now we can loosen the shackles.”9 Hitler was only able to launch his second political career because his adversaries criminally underestimated him.

  On 26 February, ten days after the ban was lifted, the Völkischer Beobachter resumed publication. In the first edition’s lead article, “How to Make our Movement Strong Again,” and another piece entitled “Appeal to the Former Members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” Hitler called for an end to the quarrels of the past: “Let us stand as before shoulder to shoulder, loyally as brothers in a great fighting community.”10 In the appended guidelines for a “new founding” of the party, all members had to reapply. However, Hitler made it clear that the most basic goal of the party had not changed in the slightest: “The entire strength of the movement is to be directed at the German people’s most terrible enemy: Jewry, Marxism and the parties that are allied with them or support them—the Centrists and the democrats.”11

  A day later Hitler made a public appearance in the Bürgerbräukeller, the place where he had launched the attempted putsch a year and a half earlier. The venue was crammed beyond capacity hours before the start of the event, and when Hitler finally appeared, he was greeted with frenetic applause. Several prominent figures—Ludendorff, Rosenberg, Röhm and Gregor Strasser—were not in attendance, and the party’s original founder Anton Drexler, who had just failed in his attempt to push out Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher, stayed away as well. Publisher Max Amann moderated the event in his stead. By no means did Hitler show any signs of reform. On the contrary, he took up exactly where he had left off in November 1923. The largest part of his two-hour speech consisted of hateful anti-Jewish tirades that whipped the audience into a frenzy. “The Jew,” he proclaimed, was a “tool of the devil” that had plunged Germany into misery, and the battle against this “global plague” could only be won “when the swastika flag flies atop every workshop and factory.” The entire strength of the movement, Hitler demanded, must be focused on achieving this goal.

  Only towards the end of his speech did Hitler get around to addressing what was actually the topic of the event—the reconstitution of the party. He repeated his appeal to “all those who have remained National Socialists” to bury the hatchet and unite around him. At no point was there the slightest doubt about Hitler’s claim to leadership: “For nine months I haven’t said a word. Now I lead the movement, and no one has the right to place me under any conditions.” Hitler was assuming complete responsibility for the past, and now, more than a year after the attempted coup, party members could decide his fate: “If I’ve done well, then you should stop condemning me. If I’ve done badly, then I will put my office back in your hands. (Cries of ‘Never!’)”12 This theatrical ending was followed by a prearranged scene of reconciliation between the rival leaders of the NSDAP’s successor organisations. Julius Streicher, Arthur Dinter and Hermann Esser of the Pan-Germanic Ethnic Community publicly shook hands on the podium with Rudolf Buttmann, Gottfried Feder and Wilhelm Frick of the VB. “The reuniting of the two feuding brothers” was a success, Hess noted. That evening, Hitler had himself chauffeured in his new Mercedes to Bayreuth by Winifred Wagner, whom he had invited to the Bürgerbräukeller.13

  Yet despite the public pretence of unity, the quarrels continued. The Pan-Germanic Ethnic Community was dissolved in March 1925, and the majority of its members joined the NSDAP, but the membership of the VB had reservations. Of the twenty-three VB deputies in the Bavarian Landtag, only six went over to the new Nazi faction, which had been formed under Buttmann’s leadership. Ludendorff and Gregor Strasser had already stepped down from the Reich leadership of the National Socialist Liberation Movement on 12 February. But many of the people who sympathised with its aims saw Ludendorff, and not Hitler, as the true leader of the ethnic-chauvinist camp. Moreover, in early May, Anton Drexler, who was completely disillusioned with Hitler, founded an organisation of his own, the National-Social People’s League (Nationalsozialer Volksbund, or NSVB), from the remnants of the VB in Munich, although it never seriously rivalled the NSDAP.14

  Hitler’s first post-prison appearance had unpleasant consequences. On 7 March, the Bavarian government banned him from speaking in public. The authorities were particularly disconcerted by his statement that “Either the enemy will march over our dead bodies, or we will march over his”—a threat that completely negated Hitler’s promises to stay within the bounds of the law.15 Most of Germany’s other federal states, including Prussia, followed suit and prohibited Hitler from speaking as well. That robbed the party leader of his most effective weapon, his ability to stir audiences with his words. On the other hand, he was still allowed to take the podium at closed party meetings and events, and the Bruckmanns’ salon served as a kind of substitute public forum. There Hitler spoke a number of times in front of specially invited audiences of between forty and sixty guests, most of them influential representatives of business, science and culture. Here Hitler had to make a very different impression than he did in the feverish, intoxicated atmosphere of a mass event. Even in his external appearance, as
the historian Karl Alexander von Müller noted, Hitler adapted to the social circumstances by donning a dark-blue jacket or even a tuxedo. This was “an entirely new school of propaganda, dissimulation and seduction,” wrote Müller. The historian was also struck by Hitler’s physiognomic changes: “His thin, pale, sickly, oft empty-seeming face had become pinched, which caused his facial bones, from his forehead to his chin, to emerge more starkly. His enthusiasm had yielded to an unmistakable streak of severity. Essentially he had already become how people would later remember him.”16

  If Hitler wanted to realise his ambition of absolute leadership of the NSDAP, he had to get rid of his political rivals, in particular Ludendorff, from whom he had already distanced himself while in Landsberg. It was no accident that Hitler failed to mention Ludendorff once in his speech on 27 February. Only after the staged reconciliation of the rival factions did he pay tribute to the general “who will always be the German people’s military leader.” Conversely, Ludendorff felt disappointed by Hitler. The party chairman suffered from “a psychotic fortress mentality,” Ludendorff complained privately. The general had already announced in early February that he would withdraw from politics if Hitler reconstituted the NSDAP, although Ludendorff retained his Reichstag mandate.17